The sonata is still a relatively early work of Szymanowski, but represents the apogee of his Late Romantic period.

Shortly after its completion, Szymanowski wrote in a letter to Polish friend and music historian Zdzisław Jachimecki:"I have just finished the second 'Piano Sonata' before Arthur arrived.

The movement enfolds a whole world of mercurial emotion: from tenderness, through great passion, to passages marked furioso, to quasi heroic affirmation—all undermined by constant, restless chromatic harmonic movement which gives it a sense of edgy anxiety.

After a performance of the sonata at a concert devoted to Szymanowski's works in December 1911, Willy Renz wrote in the magazine Die Musik:“If the composer forces himself towards greater transparency, to a sensible limit and concentration, if he can restrain his excessive fondness for contrapuntal tricks, polyphonic complications and orchestral excesses, we will have high hopes of him”[4]After attending a 1912 performance of the sonata by Arthur Rubinstein in Berlin, feeling that he could never reach Rubinstein's level as a pianist nor Szymanowski's level as a composer, Heinrich Neuhaus attempted suicide.

[5] The sonata has developed a reputation of an extremely hard piece to master, both musically and technically, and after the Second World War it found its way into the repertoire of pianists such as Sviatoslav Richter or Marc-André Hamelin.